Joined: Wed Dec 13, 2006 5:27 amPosts: 3129Location: A little south and a lot west of Moscow

Re: Magnaut

This last world is going to be pretty hard. Here's a video of me barely making it through part of it:

The two new enemies this time are a disk thrower, and a mine layer.

The disk acts like a boomerang, and will always return to its ship. Until it returns, you can't fire again. Of note is the fact that it's the only projectile in the game which can loop around the edges of the screen — otherwise, it can be fired off-screen and totally blindside you when it flies back in. I suppose that's kind of inconsistent behaviour, but it seems better than the alternative.

The mine layer lays mines, predictably! The mines are activated when an enemy comes close enough, and they deal damage based on how close you are to the center of the blast. They're quite effective against groups since they can immediately deal high damage to a large-ish radius. Each ship can only have one mine deployed at a time, so if it places a new one, the old one will be triggered. Hopefully that'll be clear to players. If not, then I might have to change the behaviour a bit!

Anyway, this might be the last video for a while. Next, I'll be making the final boss, followed by bonus stages and a seeeeeeecret. Aside from the bonus stages, I don't want to spoil all of that, so I might keep it under wraps for now. The good news is, once that's through, I'll be just about ready for beta!

Sat Jun 08, 2013 6:20 am

Miggles

Data Realms Elite

Joined: Mon Jul 12, 2010 5:39 amPosts: 4555

Re: Magnaut

i reaaaaaally like that musicyou should definitely upload a full, un-ingame versionhave you thought of selling/distributing the soundtrack as an extra/bonus for extra dosh/separately? maybe with some exclusive songs only on there?

Sun Jun 09, 2013 2:39 am

TheLastBanana

DRL Developer

Joined: Wed Dec 13, 2006 5:27 amPosts: 3129Location: A little south and a lot west of Moscow

Re: Magnaut

What you just described is exactly the plan. I'll probably sell the soundtrack for $5 or something (no more than the game itself for sure), and it'll come with some bonus tracks too.

Sun Jun 09, 2013 2:55 am

Urch

Joined: Mon Sep 28, 2009 2:15 amPosts: 720Location: A fucking desert.

Re: Magnaut

that boomerang weapon looks like fun

Sun Jun 09, 2013 6:19 am

TheLastBanana

DRL Developer

Joined: Wed Dec 13, 2006 5:27 amPosts: 3129Location: A little south and a lot west of Moscow

Re: Magnaut

They're probably one of the trickier weapons to use, since the amount of damage it does relies on you keeping the weapon pointed straight at the enemy. I'm interested to see what people think of them during testing.

I really like the boomerang weapon. Makes me want to have a ship with five of them and just spin around shooting.

(Are the graphics going to be moddable? I feel like messing around with them.)

Tue Jun 11, 2013 4:00 pm

TheLastBanana

DRL Developer

Joined: Wed Dec 13, 2006 5:27 amPosts: 3129Location: A little south and a lot west of Moscow

Re: Magnaut

Unfortunately, Flash compiles all of the content into one file, so it's not very moddable.

Tue Jun 11, 2013 9:35 pm

Miggles

Data Realms Elite

Joined: Mon Jul 12, 2010 5:39 amPosts: 4555

Re: Magnaut

FLASH?A-AAAAAAAAAAAAA!savior of the universe

Can we have the music from world 5 please? Pretty pretty please? Pleeeease?

Wed Jun 12, 2013 8:07 am

TheLastBanana

DRL Developer

Joined: Wed Dec 13, 2006 5:27 amPosts: 3129Location: A little south and a lot west of Moscow

Re: Magnaut

Yeah, I probably won't be using Flash again. It has a lot of issues. It will make it pretty easy to distribute a demo, and if selling the game as a download falls through, I could also sell a license to a Flash portal. So, at least there's that.

Anyway, I was planning to save this one for the soundtrack, but since you asked so nicely, here you go:

Thu Jun 13, 2013 6:33 am

Miggles

Data Realms Elite

Joined: Mon Jul 12, 2010 5:39 amPosts: 4555

Re: Magnaut

Miggles wrote:

FLASH?A-AAAAAAAAAAAAA!savior of the universe

maybe if i make it bigger

also thank you very kind man

Thu Jun 13, 2013 8:01 am

Contrary

Joined: Mon Mar 16, 2009 10:50 pmPosts: 2175Location: Neverwhere

Re: Magnaut

How do you compose all these great tracks?

Thu Jun 13, 2013 8:02 am

Miggles

Data Realms Elite

Joined: Mon Jul 12, 2010 5:39 amPosts: 4555

Re: Magnaut

do you use tlb

Thu Jun 13, 2013 8:35 am

TheLastBanana

DRL Developer

Joined: Wed Dec 13, 2006 5:27 amPosts: 3129Location: A little south and a lot west of Moscow

Re: Magnaut

Haha, glad to hear you guys like them.

I'm using REAPER to put all the music together. It's a great program, and its interface is really nice (other than the occasional minor thing).

As for synths, there are a few different things I'm using.

Most of the instruments are VOPM synths. It's a VST that emulates the YM2151 sound chip, which was used pretty heavily in 80s arcade games. Given the option, I probably would have gone for something emulating the YM2612 (the Mega Drive chip), but I think this one comes close enough. Anyway, I grabbed this huge library of sound configurations from Mega Drive games for VOPM, and used them as reference to set up some basic bass and guitar synths. As you can see, there are a lot of settings:

So, I've just been playing around with my existing instruments and tweaking them until they sound nice. At this point, I've made 15 different bass variants and 11 different guitar variants, as well as a cheesy synth horn.

The other synth I use is the Synth1 VST. Mostly, I use it for square waves, since VOPM can't really synthesize them. It also shows up in two other places, both of which you can hear in Error Rave. One is the laser sound, which you can hear at 0:10 and the other is that robotic voice you can faintly hear at 0:56.

Lastly, there's the percussion, which took me until about a month ago to get right. I think Resolute is the only track I've uploaded that currently has them in a state I'm happy with. The rest have all had their drum tracks reworked, but I haven't uploaded them yet since it's a somewhat minor change. I made a post about that back here. The samples themselves are largely from DrumSamples.org, a few drum samples from the PXTone Manual, and an orchestra hit from beatproduction.net.

As for actually composing the music... I have absolutely no idea. I don't have any formal training in music, nor can even play any instruments, so this soundtrack really is just the culmination of several years' worth of screwing around with a bunch of music software. So it's pretty cool that people like it, because going in, I had no idea if I was actually going to be able to pull off an entire soundtrack. I've been drawing a lot of inspiration from FantomenK, Earthworm Jim, the Mega Drive Sonic games, and Danny Baranowsky, but that's pretty much the only part of the process I could actually clearly describe, aside from "put some notes on the screen, listen, and throw them out if they sound bad," haha.

Thu Jun 13, 2013 8:54 pm

TheLastBanana

DRL Developer

Joined: Wed Dec 13, 2006 5:27 amPosts: 3129Location: A little south and a lot west of Moscow

Re: Magnaut

So, I'm (slowly) working on the final boss. It's been a busy couple of weeks, and the boss is also going to be somewhat complicated, so it might be a while.

In the meantime, though, I also put together a new theme for the first world. Electroargentum is already going to show up as the title theme, and there are going to be remixes/pieces of it for the level complete theme, the game over theme, and maybe an invincibility theme or something? So, for the sake of not making everybody completely sick of it, it seemed like a good plan to have something different as world 1's background music.

Y'know, I've had this thread bookmarked, and every time I typed in the url to get to drl this was the thread I came to.So after a few months of seeing this thread dead, I'm wondering, where's the game at right now?

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